They all stared, like me, at the quartzite forward panes. Blue sky should have been visible through them, warm sunlight should have been flooding the turret. The terrain of Caltech should have stretched before our gaze. But guess again. All we could see was a gooey splatter of stuff oozing up the sides of the Pegasus. A strange, viscous, colorless matter that surged up and about our ship with weird, tentacular writhings. It covered the entire pane, gulped and burbled sloppily as it engulfed the top of the ship. We continued to experience that sinking feeling—
"Sweet whispering stars!" gasped the skipper. "Am I off my gravs? Do you see what I see? The ground melted an' come up an' et us!"
And I knew, suddenly, what had happened to those who had landed before us on mysterious Caltech. Like us they had been swallowed beneath the soggy, flypaper crust of the alien planet.
Well, everything happened at once, then. I guess I'm just a bug-pounder at heart, after all. My first thought was composed of dots and dashes. I made a bee-line for the radio room, powered the tubes and began CQ-ing up and down the wavelengths like a longhair at the Steinway.
Which was just so much wasted time. I couldn't draw a hum out of the audio. Even the more delicate earphones failed to bring in the powerful Mars-Ceres beam. And if I couldn't get a message in, it's a damn sure thing I couldn't get one out. My transmission was blanked out.
So I hung a sign on my door, OUT TO LUNCH, and went back to the control turret. It looked like the bleacher entrance to Terra Stadium on the opening day of the Interplanetary Series. Everybody and his brother was there. Officers, engineers, blasters, stewards. Even Slops had come up, armed with a rolling pin, to find out what had happened.
As I entered, Johnny Larkin was turning off the hypatomic power, swiveling around to face the skipper.
"No go, Captain. I've tried anti-grav, neg potential and reverse rockets. We can't get loose. We seem to be in something akin to quicksand. Every move we make digs us in a little deeper."
Bowman growled savagely, "If you hadda used common sense instead o' makin' billy-doos with y'r eyes—but this ain't no time to talk about truffles. What do you think? Is this here planet somethin' like Jupiter? Low specific, so we keep fallin' toward the center?"